Ten years as a Member of the Lok Sabha for Basti — what the office requires, the committee work it involved, and the published record of attendance, questions and debate for both terms.
The office
The Lok Sabha is the directly elected House of India’s Parliament. Each of its members carries a single, unusual mandate: to be the one person formally answerable, inside the national legislature, for a defined territory and everyone who lives in it. For ten years that territory was Basti — a district of roughly 2.46 million people across five assembly segments and fourteen development blocks.
The office is easy to caricature and harder to describe accurately. It is not executive: a Member of Parliament does not run departments, sanction most works, or command administration. Its real instruments are narrower and, used properly, sharper — the question that compels a ministry to put an answer on the record, the debate that shapes how a bill is finally worded, the committee report that becomes the basis for a policy change, and the sustained correspondence that keeps a departmental file moving.
Alongside all of this sits the constituency itself, which generates a continuous stream of individual and collective grievance. The genuine skill of the office lies in the conversion: taking a village-level problem and finding the parliamentary instrument that can actually act on it.
Four duties
To hold and voice the interests of a specific constituency inside a national assembly, including the interests of people who did not vote for you.
To scrutinise, debate and vote on bills, and to improve their drafting through committee examination before they become law.
To hold the executive to account through questions, motions and committee reports that oblige ministries to explain themselves publicly.
To provide a route by which citizens can bring grievances to the national level when local remedies have been exhausted.
The published record
Parliament publishes attendance, question and debate counts for every member so that citizens can measure their representative. The figures below are reproduced as recorded, with the national and state averages against which they should be read.
| Measure | 16th Lok Sabha 2014–2019 |
17th Lok Sabha 2019–2024 |
National average 17th Lok Sabha |
Uttar Pradesh average 17th Lok Sabha |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attendance | 86% | 74% | 79% | 83% |
| Questions asked | 328 | 190 | 210 | 151 |
| Debates participated in | — | 21 | 46.7 | 62.1 |
| Private member’s bills | — | 0 | 1.5 | 1.3 |
| Committees served on | 3 | 1 (as Chairperson) | — | — |
Figures as published in parliamentary tracking records. A dash indicates that a comparable figure is not available in the sources used for this page, and no estimate has been substituted. Session-level attendance during the 17th Lok Sabha varied considerably — from 17% in one session to 100% in the Special Session of 2023 and the Budget Session of 2024. Questions asked exceeded the Uttar Pradesh state average in the 17th Lok Sabha; attendance and debate participation fell below both the state and national averages, and are published here for that reason rather than in spite of it.
On questions. The question is the most direct instrument available to a backbench member. A starred question can require a minister to answer orally on the floor and submit to supplementaries; an unstarred question produces a written answer that enters the record permanently. Across two terms, 518 questions were asked — 328 in the 16th Lok Sabha and 190 in the 17th.
On committees. Committee membership is where a member has the greatest influence per hour spent. Four assignments over ten years — Energy, Information Technology, Finance, and the chairmanship of the Committee on Petitions — span rural electrification, digital access, public finance and the direct redress of citizens’ grievances.
2019 – 2024
Of all the committees of the Lok Sabha, the Committee on Petitions is the one most directly connected to the ordinary citizen. It exists so that a person or a group outside Parliament can formally place a grievance, or a matter of general public interest, before the House itself — not through a minister, not through a department, but through the legislature.
The committee examines petitions presented to the House and representations addressed to members, calls for departmental responses, and reports its findings and recommendations back to the House. It is, in effect, Parliament’s own grievance mechanism.
Chairing it for the full term of the 17th Lok Sabha meant presiding over the process by which those representations were examined and pursued — work that has an obvious continuity with the constituency side of the job, where the same kinds of unresolved grievance arrive daily.
Standing committees
Departmentally related standing committees examine the demands for grants, bills and long-term policy of assigned ministries. Their reports are among the most substantive documents Parliament produces.
The committee covering power and new and renewable energy. For a rural constituency this is not an abstract portfolio: dependable supply determines whether tube wells run through the irrigation season, whether cold storage is viable near the field, and whether a small workshop can operate a full shift.
Covering communications, electronics and information technology, and information and broadcasting. The committee’s subject matter decides how far digital public services, banking correspondence and market price information actually penetrate beyond district towns.
One of the widest briefs in Parliament — finance, corporate affairs, planning and statistics. It is the committee through which the allocation side of every other policy is ultimately examined, including agricultural credit and rural expenditure.
In the course of duty
From constituency to chamber
The path is longer than most people assume, and it fails at every stage where the detail is imprecise. This is the sequence that actually works.
A grievance is raised at a gathering, a village visit or an office meeting — usually as a particular instance rather than a general problem: this pump has not worked since March, this payment has not come.
One instance is a case for the district administration. Thirty instances of the same failure across fourteen blocks is a systems problem, and belongs in a different forum entirely.
A question if the aim is to force disclosure; a representation to the ministry if the aim is administrative action; a committee reference if the design of the scheme itself is at fault.
An answer on the record is a beginning, not a conclusion. Following it through departmental correspondence until something changes on the ground is the part of the work nobody sees.
This page describes the responsibilities of the office and reproduces the published record of attendance, questions, debates and committee service. It does not attribute specific national schemes, projects or policy outcomes to any individual member, because parliamentary work is collective and such attribution would not be accurate.
Continue
The signature subject of this website — the Basti plain, its rivers and crops, its village industry, and what a serious rural development agenda has to address.